“Enlisted by a team of honor students for a seminar on superheroes, a mild-mannered professor discovers his inner obsession. Assuming the powers of a novelist, teacher, playwright, and scholar, Professor Chris Gavaler embarks on a mission to unlock the secrets of the multiverse.”

January 2, 2012Superman for President (Or, Which Alternate Earth is Newt Gingrich From?)

Newt Gingrich wants to be Superman.

In fact, most of the Republican Presidential contenders want to be Superman. Mitt Romney. Rick Perry. Even Herman Cain. To his credit, Rick Santorum only wants to be Superman knock-off Mr. Incredible. But since Santorum’s national polls have never left the single digits, kryptonite is the least of his worries.

Darren Garnick and his nine-year-old son, Ari, recently asked each Republican: “If you could be any superhero in the world, who would you be and why?” (If you haven’t seen the six-minute documentary, you should:Republicans in Tights.)

The question mostly reveals the politician’s age. Santorum was born in 1958, but Gingrich, Cain, Romney, and Perry are all late Superhero Golden Agers, born between 1943 and 1950. They admitted to “showing their age,” naming the first (and possibly only) superhero they remembered growing up. Ron Paul, the one candidate to snub the nine-year-old interviewer, was born in 1935, and so also the one candidate to predate the birth of the comic book.

When Obama was asked a similar question (by Entertainment Weekly, not Ari) back on the 2008 campaign trail, he named Batman and Spider-Man because “they have some inner turmoil. They get knocked around a little bit.” That’s Silver Age talk. Barack was born in 1961, the year the Fantastic Four launched themselves to the moon and Marvel Comics into pop culture. His opponent John McCain said Batman too, but because he pursues justice “against insurmountable odds,” a good ole Golden Age rationale. McCain was born in 1936, the same year as Detective Comics.

Gingrich is the oldest of the Superman pack, born as the Allies began to retake Europe from the Nazis. I’ll admit the idea of a Gingrich White House frightens me more than a Romney White House (The New York Times Magazine recently dubbed Mitt “All-Business Man, the world’s most boring superhero”). A Gingrich White House would be more like Lex Luthor winning the Presidency back in 2000. An event eliminated in the recent DC universe reboot.

I’m sure Newt would like to reboot a few facts in his timeline too. Like that affair he was having while his first wife was dying of cancer. Or that other affair he was having while trying to impeach Bill Clinton for hiding his own extramarital activities. If the guy’s going to wear a letter on his chest, it’s Hester Prynne’s, not Superman’s.

But Professor Gingrich doesn’t need a comic book to rewrite history for him. Superman spun the earth backwards on its axis to reset time. Newt does it with a pen. He’s published two alternate universe novels. One reboots the Civil War so the South wins at Gettysburg (thanks, we needed that). The second prevents the U.S. from entering World War II so that Germany can conquer Russia and face the U.S. in a new cold war.

And where would Newt be without a cold war? If elected, he plans a return to a comic book universe of pure good vs. evil. Instead of battling the nefarious Soviet Union, he’s casting the entire Muslim world as his new arch nemesis. Even Israel endorses a two-state peace with Palestine. Not Newt. On Earth Gingrich, Palestinians are a fictional people, no more deserving of self-determination than molemen, doombots or any other subset of evil minions.

President Obama’s other reason for endorsing the “Spider Man/Batman model” (his term) was his dislike for Superman’s lazy privilege: “The guys who have too many powers — like Superman — that always made me think they weren’t really earning their superhero status. It’s a little too easy.”

Isn’t that what Occupy Wall Street’s been shouting all year?

Leave it to the Republican field to emulate the ultimate 1%, Superman, the superhero of all superheroes. George Bernard Shaw (the guy who coined “superman” from Neitzsche’s “ubermensch”) prophesied that “the real Superman will snap his superfingers at all Man’s present trumpery ideals of right, duty, honor, justice, religion, even decency, and accept moral obligations beyond present human endurance.”

In other words, Superman’s sense of right and wrong will have nothing to do with what the rest of us think. Superman is only worried about his fellow Supermen.